Sir John Desmond Patrick KeeganOBEFRSL (15 May 1934 - 2 August 2012) was an English military historian, lecturer, writer and journalist. He was the author of many published works on the nature of combat between the 14th and 21st centuries concerning land, air, maritime, and intelligence warfare, as well as the psychology of battle.

Life and career

At the age of 13 Keegan contracted orthopaedic tuberculosis, which subsequently affected his gait. The long-term effects of his tuberculosis rendered him unfit for military service, and the timing of his birth made him too young for service in the Second World War, facts he mentioned in his works as an ironic observation on his profession and interests.[1] The illness also interrupted his education during his teenage years. However, his education included a period at King's College, Taunton, and two years at Wimbledon College, which led to entry to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1953. Following graduation he worked at the American Embassy in London for three years.[2]

In 1960 Keegan was appointed to a lectureship in military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the training establishment for officers of the British Army. In holding the post for 26 years, he became senior lecturer in military history during his tenure, during which he also held a visiting professorship at Princeton University and was Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar College.[3]

Leaving the academy in 1986,[4] Keegan joined the Daily Telegraph as a Defence Correspondent and remained with the publication as Defence Editor until his death, also writing for the American conservative website, National Review Online. In 1998 he wrote and presented the BBC's Reith Lectures, entitled War in our World.

Keegan died on 2 August 2012 of natural causes at his home in Kilmington, western England. He was survived by his wife, their two daughters and two sons.[5]

Opinions on contemporary conflicts

Vietnam: When asked about the Vietnam War, Keegan repled: "I will never oppose the Vietnam War. Americans were right to do it. I think they fought it in the wrong way. I don't think it's a war like fighting Hitler, but I think it was a right war, a correct war."[6]

Kosovo: Keegan believed that NATO's bombing of Serbia and Serbian targets in Kosovo in 1999 showed that air power alone could win wars.[7]

Iraq War: An article in The Christian Science Monitor called Keegan a "staunch supporter" of the Iraq War. The article quotes Keegan: "Uncomfortable as the 'spectacle of raw military force' is, he concludes that the Iraq war represents 'a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer.'"[8]

Criticism

Keegan was also criticised by peers, including Sir Michael Howard[9] and Christopher Bassford[10] for his critical position on Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian officer and author of Vom Kriege (On War), one of the basic texts on warfare and military strategy. Keegan was described as "profoundly mistaken" and Bassford stated that "Nothing anywhere in Keegan's work - despite his many diatribes about Clausewitz and 'the Clausewitzians' - reflects any reading whatsoever of Clausewitz's own writings." The political scientist Richard Betts also criticised Keegan's understanding of the political dimensions of war, writing that Keegan was "a naïf about politics."[11]

Noting Keegan's works on the Waffen-SS, the military historian S.P. MacKenzie describes him as a popular historian "partially or wholly seduced by [its] mystique". He connects Keegan with the contemporary Waffen-SS historical revisionism, first propounded by HIAG, the Waffen-SS lobby group from the 1950-1990s. Commenting on this contemporary trend, Mackenzie writes that "as older generation of Waffen-SS scribes has died off, a new, post-war cadre of writers has done much to perpetuate the image of the force as a revolutionary European army" and includes Keegan in this group.[12]

In August 2015, Russia's government considered banning Keegan's works, accusing him of Nazi sympathies.[13]

Published work

In A History of Warfare, Keegan outlined the development and limitations of warfare from prehistory to the modern era. It looked at various topics, including the use of horses, logistics, and "fire". One key concept put forward was that war is inherently cultural.[20] In the introduction, he vigorously denounced the idiom "war is a continuation of policy by other means", rejecting on its face "Clausewitzian" ideas. Keegan's discussion of Clausewitz was, however, heavily criticised as uninformed and inaccurate, by writers like Peter Paret, Christopher Bassford, and Richard M. Swain.[21]

He also contributed to work on historiography in modern conflict. With Richard Holmes he wrote the BBC documentary Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle. Frank C. Mahncke wrote that Keegan is seen as being "among the most prominent and widely read military historians of the late twentieth century".[22] In a book-cover blurb extracted from a more complex article, Sir Michael Howard wrote, "at once the most readable and the most original of living historians".[23]

Keegan's Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America, which gave accounts of many of the wars fought on the soil of North America, also contained opening and closing essays on his own personal relationship to America. He continued his interest in American military history with the publication of his book The American Civil War: A Military History (2009, Hutchinson).[]

Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (2003) ISBN0-375-40053-2 (also published with alternative subtitle as Intelligence in War: The value - and limitations - of what the military can learn about the enemyISBN0-375-70046-3)